from my diary, Paris in the autumn -01:
"We hear cello music on the place des Vosges. The late afternoon sun warms the 17th century houses, the shadows are icy cold in the arcades, and somewhere in between light and shadow the air is vibrating with a cello. As one of several silly and persistent poets I get the impulse: 'I must write it!' - No. There are rare true moments when poetry completely merges with life. Why should anyone write just then?"

We who are born with wing quills instead of fingers and perceive every white page as a not yet cultivated garden find it difficult to refrain from writing. The best and the worst of life must be written, otherwise it has not happened. The mediocre side of life must at least be described, otherwise nothing will happen. But one moment of cello music on the place des Vosges is in itself.

The poet's duty is to write what is not yet. To surpass the incomplete, the not fully present. To explore the borderland that exists everywhere, inside and around us.

The poet's duty is also to write what yet is, the unsolved rests that prose cannot cover. The shadows, the blur, voices demanding to be heard.

We've got time to pass many borders in a day and in a century.
Sometimes I write in English. Here's why and how.

drinking diary and writing wine…

Writing is the greatest freedom and the greatest loneliness. It has the function of a floodlight outwards to the unknown borderlands of sanity, and of a microscope backwards into memory and mind.

Each kind of writing has its time. Office hours is for writing reports. Free time is occupied by writing diary as therapy and poetry as art. Agitatorial proclamations is done in agitated time, and fortunately email is done in no time at all.

Writing can be done anywhere: on aeroplanes and trains, at cafés, in your garden chairs, at the edge of the table. It is done in your head without a pen or keyboard.

The desk in the photo is from the 1880's and once stood in the chamber of my grandfather's old farm. After my father died I heard that the desk was to be found way back in a summer cabin. I had it fetched from there, though people warned me: "It's worthless, drawers askew and cracked veneer!" That is correct. I made several cracks myself as a child. So now I had the joy to retrieve a desk where I drew horses and wrote summer letters forty years ago. I recognize the cracked surface under my forefinger.

Webbdesign 2000 av Joker. Sidan senast uppdaterad 2003-06-18 17:09